caulfield12

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 22, 2013 -> 12:15 AM) Don't be fooled. They think they can compete in this division as soon as next year. However they aren't going to sell the farm to get an overpriced declining bat. If all goes right they have several middle order hitters and the pitching staff to win a lot of games. Obviously that hinges on a few things: 1. Abreu has to be as good as advertised. 2. Garcia proves to be a serviceable 5 hitter 3. Dunn has a good season. 4. They acquire one more proven bat, most likely in the infield. I'd add that Viciedo has to be a 25-30 HR, 85-105 RBI.....270-290ish hitter. And Santiago has to take the next step and sustain it throughout the season, along with Danks looking more like a 2 than a 4/5 starter. Finally, the middle relief has to be serviceable.

QUOTE (Dunt @ Nov 20, 2013 -> 10:33 PM) I guess I phrased that wrong. I dont think he will do something to try responding to this trade, but I wonder if he gets a little twitchy with a trade proposal he has on the table right now. Why, we're not in win or compete now mode. He went through the entire offseason last year basically doing nothing. No reason to be twitchy or itchy now. If anything, it's the Cubs with a lot more pressure to improve themselves instantly at the major league level.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Nov 20, 2013 -> 08:12 PM) Dombrowski has done everything right for this team. Except for leaving them short in the bullpen, fielding-wise and lacking speed (with the exception of Austin Jackson). They also have to find a full-time LFer and replacement for Victor Martinez at DH. Presumably, Castellanos will play 3B now, instead of LF. That's one issue resolved. Still think they should upgrade Avila at catcher.

QUOTE (Baron @ Nov 20, 2013 -> 08:03 PM) Some say the Rangers are going to still pursue McCann and Choo Choo and Rios both have their best position as RF.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Nov 20, 2013 -> 02:07 PM) Because what you are assuming isn't correct either. There's no guarantee that a moral and ethical development in Latin America presents the Sox with 2 regulars from Latin America. Williams was not spending much as it was on the minor league system, instead using that money on the major league team. The $600K Silveiro signing was the biggest for the Sox during a period of time when top amateur international free agents were signing for $2-4 million. They weren't spending down there as it was. Right now, the major league roster is in very poor shape. With a ton of creativity and a lot of parts moving around, you can get some semblance of a competitive team this year. By simply throwing money at players on the wrong side of the aging curve and giving them 4 year deals, you are talking about buying their most productive years while the team is going to be poor and then seeing their performances fall off during the last 2 years when the team is supposed to be competitive. When you do that, you end up like the Mariners of the late 00s, fluctuating between 65 and 80 wins with one season where they found a lot of luck and ended up winning around 85 or 87 games. Instead, they should make like the Athletics and acquire packages of prospects, buy low on players, and bring in undervalued players. If you look at the current Athletics team, that's exactly what they've done with the one exception of Yoenis Cespedes. The Sox need to buy low on players (Josh Johnson and John Jaso are examples of that) while otherwise getting and remaining young. Signing, say, Curtis Granderson would not do that, especially now that they have to give up a 2nd round pick for him. He's older and had already shown signs of decline prior to this past (freak) injury plagued year. Of course, most of their (A's) success is predicated on pitching/bullpen and the trade for and eventual emergence of Josh Donaldson. The White Sox simply need another version of Quentin/Donaldson (in 2008/09, Danks/Alexei/Floyd/Quentin). Easier said than done. And Abreu has to have a huge impact, like Cespedes and Puig. They simply can't afford to be wrong on that move. But that's definitely the model the White Sox should be following. Then, when they're closer to being able to compete, they can add those "glue/complementary" pieces like a CoCo Crisp, Lowrie, Vogt, etc.

QUOTE (Brian @ Nov 19, 2013 -> 10:57 AM) I didn't like Pitt putting himself in that role. It was a small part but crucial and Brad Pitt felt wrong there. Watched the documentary "Blackfish" yesterday. Really good. I'm far from an animal activist, I love my dog, I eat meat, but I'll never go to one of those Sea World shows after watching. That's where Fassbender should take all the credit for playing the villain, or even Leo DiCaprio a year ago. Playing the "voice of 95% of Hollywood" doesn't make for much of a stretch. The audience doesn't really need a lecture about the evils of slavery at that point in the film, it's already been hammered home. Maybe directing-wise, it felt like there needed to be some warm or humanity added...after all the brutality. It didn't ruin the movie at all, it was just a poor fit in casting. Probably more one of those "well, Brad Pitt is one of the producers so there's no way in HELL we're going to turn him down if he wants to appear in the film." There's also that "white people always saving black people" feel to it. I thought the "human/sympathetic" character was played much better by the "senior butler" whose home the hero/protagonist broke into looking for food in The Butler.

QUOTE (onedude @ Nov 18, 2013 -> 08:46 PM) It was a powerful film. I think Chiwetel has it locked up. Fantastic performances all around. Cumberbatch, Dano, and Pitt were all very good in small roles...even Giamatti was excellent. Sad that he's still best known for 2012. That will change in a big way after the Oscars. Saw Jobs finally. Ashton Kutcher put in an adequate but not quite great performance. Would have loved to have seen more information about how they developed the Iphone or Ipad, rather than the origin story of Jobs/Wozniak and his fall from grace at the hands of John Scully taking up over 3/4th's of the film. The Way Way Back was a cool little film. Sam Rockwell, while I usually don't like him (he's got a bit of a Christopher Walken in him), was good in this film.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 19, 2013 -> 10:30 AM) Look at how many teams have spent years being boned because of their financial stupidity. How would you like to be the Mets for example? Like the Rangers? Sometimes it's better to be lucky or in the right place at the right time.

To most evaluators, the only thing more surprising than Quintana transforming from PED-suspension washout, to twice-released minor league free agent to churning out a 200-inning season with an ERA 22% better than the league average, would be him demonstrating the ability to do it consistently. Quintana’s rapid growth and improvement is fascinating, and I will be eager to see his next steps no matter where they take place, but it would be hard to question the logic of selling high on him at this point. This is a chance to trade someone thought to have back-end rotation talent at best after a year of producing like a fringe No. 2 starter. His 2013 season is the magical “???” stage in the three-step path to profit. Assuming–which I would like to do–that Quintana is the real deal, there’s still an issue of who is going to made available if not him. Without Sale, Garcia or Abreu, Quintana was the biggest trade piece the Sox had. Without him, there might not be anyone capable of pulling in an above-average regular on his own. Hector Santiago has value, as does Addison Reed or Alexei Ramirez. But if there’s any substantive change to be made to this offense in this offseason, these are awfully small tools to go to work with. Dealing spare parts can expect similar returns. Given their success in the area, trading from starting pitching and placing faith in their ability to develop replacements would be a way for the White Sox to play to their strengths. Jose Quintana could and should have years of great value to provide them, but the more the White Sox limit their options, the slower the rebuild they’re signing up for becomes. www.southsideshowdown.com A lot are taking issue with the limitation of being limited to trading only Santiago instead of Quintana. That definitely limits your options/return. As far as are we better off....we won't know until we see Abreu play for at least one year and we find a permanent/long-term solution at catcher. I'd probably add the third piece would be finding a long-term solution for replacing Alexei Ramirez at SS, even though you could certainly say that about CF/leadoff, 2B or 3B. In the short term, we most need to improve the catching position, and we simply don't have have anyone at the minor league level profiling now as a future starter. Kevan Smith was a favorite of quite a few of the scouting crowd, but he seems to have taken a step back, and we all know what happened with Phegley. We do have the infield pieces (Semien, Sanchez, L. Garcia and Micah Johnson) but still a lot of uncertainty about where they fit and which ones have the ability, both offensively AND defensively, to play everyday.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 16, 2013 -> 11:38 AM) But...having a record as a team with multiple 90 loss seasons in a row really hurts in keeping players/attracting new players as well. A single 90 loss team has put us in a spot where guys who might look for short term deals with competitive teams to take a last shot at a playoff run are poor fits for us. That might be the best thing....to scare Granderson away, since he wants to play for a winning team.

Bill Toasted Almon

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Nov 16, 2013 -> 09:42 AM) Having a reputation as a player friendly organization DOES have a place. There is a pretty good chance that is what kept Paul Konerko and Mark Buehrle from fleeing to greener pastures during their prime years for example. Especially in Buehrle's case, they paid no where near what other teams would have paid to get him. If it means taking a 38 year old Konerko for a year on a team that has no chance anyway, I am fine with that. Dye wanted to stay until the Rios acquisition....Bobby Jenks seems like he really wanted to stay and felt comfortable, Thome, before he was pushed out by Ozzie. Of course, on the other hand, players can get TOO comfortable. Being TOO loyal has a price, as well. If MLB teams were run like NFL squads with a "what have you done for me lately?" attitude and players really were forced to fight and struggle for their survival on the roster on a yearly basis, then things would be quite different. What's that saying about motivation? You have to be feared or loved, but you can't have both very easily as a coach/manager or GM.

Or we're basically admitting that we have NOBODY in our minor league system we want to give those at-bats to, so, just because of 2005, we're going to gift Paulie a final farewell tour/contract year and give him 150-200 at-bats against mostly LH starters and as a PH and occasional defensive replacement...well, also because Jerry wants to watch Paulie rather than Dan Wilkins or Black or whoever. Of course, none of this is helping us prepare for 2015 in any way. It also flies in the face of the "it's always better to let a player go one year too early, rather than one year too late" theory/philosophy. Now that I think about it, I'd give those ab's to Leury Garcia to see if he can hit at the big league level, even though he's far from a prototypical DH candidate.

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Nov 16, 2013 -> 08:12 AM) I think we just need to get used to having a lower payroll. When KW was GM, he would put almost all available money into the MLB roster at the expense of draft spending and international spending. Now with Hahn as GM, who values the farm system much more, we are going to be spending the max allotment each and every year we can on the draft pool and international free agent pool. I expect this approach will reap benefits major for our franchise. A stronger system means that you can have younger, cheaper talent on the roster. Essentially you can have the value of a $100 million payroll for $80 million. Assuming they pick the right players. I bet if you went through the Top 20-25 lists of 14-15-16 year olds in the Dominican or Venezuela from the past decade/s, there wouldn't be many who made it to the major leagues. But sure, if they were signing the equivalents of Carlos Lee and Magglio...two home-grown Latin players every decade, they'd be doing quite well, supplemented with the Cubans and then a couple of Pacific Rim players like Iguchi and Takatsu.

http://www.csnchicago.com/white-sox/de-aza...&ocid=yahoo Hahn on frustration with DeAza....and his positive attributes (seems like he was taking a page out of the message boards.)

12 Years A Slave Chiwetel Ejiofor Will win for Best Actor Lupita Nyong'o Will get nominated for Supporting Actress Michael Fassbenger Will get nominated for Supporting Actor Score/Music Hans Zimmer Best Adapted Screenplay Best Director Best Film Too early to tell about the last two categories, but I'm 100% confident Ejiofor will end up as the winner for Actor. http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/201..._of_12_yea.html And James Franco is an ass sometimes

The full interview's going to be played tomorrow morning (I think at 9) on the hour-long show. Basically, the gist of it is that he doesn't like losing, doesn't want to go through another miserable season like 2013 and that Rick and KW have a fixed budget number for the coming year, but there's still room for another acquisition as long as it fits into both short and longer-term organizational plans.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Nov 15, 2013 -> 09:48 AM) Your analysis is foolish. I wondered why you love Huntsman so much, then I recently discovered that he is very active on MSNBC (I believe some of his family even works there). NorthsideSox72, rather than watching MSNBC all day and parroting DNC talking points and ranting about the Republicans, put the remote down... read a book, perhaps do some charity, anything will be better than what you are doing. You need inner peace. Anyways, here is the real Converservative comparison between Huntsman and Reagan 1) Patriotism: Conservatives like to consider themselves patriotic. Loony Huntsman on the other hand is an extremist. When asked about Americans losing their jobs, he started speaking Chinese and bragging about how China is superior and that he goes to China all the time. That is not patriotism. Reagan was a beacon of patriotism. America and Apple pie. 2) Religion: Most "Conservatives" are religious within a framework of what is the current norm. That's pretty much a standard of "conservatives" everywhere; they want to conserve the way things are. Huntsman is a member of what many would consider a loony outsider cult. That certainly isn't conservative. Reagan stated that he believed in what is the religious norm in America at the time (Christianity). A conservative move. 3) Taxes: Conservatives support lower taxes, Reagan sure did. Huntsman wants to increase taxes on the middle class. This one is a no-brainer on who is more conservative. Reagan wins this round easily. 4) Immigration: Reagan did give out Amnesty, which is not conservative. Huntsman wants to replace U.S. workers with overseas guest workers. But what Reagan did is a more conservative move in comparison, Huntsman is just loony on immigration. Reagan wins again. I could go on, but I won't. I think you know I'm right Ummmm....he was the Ambassador to China, it's customary for anyone living/working in a foreign country, let alone representing the United States, to learn some of the local language. That's just about being respectful. I guess it's patriotic to belittle anyone who speaks another language other than English these days. He went to China all the time because that was his job, lol. His daughter was supposedly dating Bo Xilai's son. Finally, I think you'll find most Mormons are more "conservative" in terms of social issues than the average Christian in the United States. Many don't drink alcohol...there is a strong moral condemnation of women having children outside of marriage, etc. You can call it a cult, just like Scientology, but the fact is that most of their moral beliefs are very extreme compared to the mainstream (this is where the whole polygamy argument will be thrown out, which covers about 0.005% of Mormons in the United States and abroad).

This is starting to become the plot of a very bad episode of Modern Family.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 14, 2013 -> 04:00 PM) Laughable. You're not going to complain about Ted Cruz not having ascended to the top tier yet? I agree about Palin and Huckabee, and think Santorum's a lot more likely to run again than Huckabee (to represent the hard right Christian minority). The Democrats would love to see Palin, Paul, Cruz or Santorum.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Nov 14, 2013 -> 03:36 PM) I'm not saying he would hit; I'm saying you have to see if he can hit and if he has the defensive tools to cut it at shortstop every day. Really, do you want to do that sort of thing when the team is actually competitive, only to see it fail and cost you big time down the road (as Brian Anderson did in 2006)? So then your system has to be good enough that you can bring up 2-3 players every season (like the Cardinals or Red Sox) and you'll feel confident enough that they can hold their own at some point (fairly quickly, at that). Right now, after the results we've recently seen with Flowers, with Phegley, with Beckham and even Viciedo....that confidence level is at an all-time low, to the point where many are assuming that none of our prospects will ever hit the ground running or that it will require 2-3 years of "on the job training" for them to make it. I'd still love to see the 2006 season play out with Chris Young in CF and no Javy Vazquez, with McCarthy as the 5th starter. To this day, I never understood why we had a compelling need to have six major league capable starters, at the cost of one position in the starting line-up suffering.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Nov 14, 2013 -> 02:24 PM) I don't think Garcia is that poor of a hitter, but besides that, what better time to start evaluating and developing a SS at the MLB level then now? I've said it elsewhere, but I fully believe Garcia will be a 2 WAR SS and he could get as high as 4 WAR. I don't view him as an untalented throw a way piece. He's been lauded for his defense and the speed is absolutely for real. He can work on his hit tool a bit and develop a bit of patience at the plate, we could be looking at like .270/.330/.370 sort of player with 40+ steal potential. Again, not incredible, but that would be very nice out of the shortstop position. Once again, we're stuck in this constant negativity loop around the idea of the White Sox developing/improving hitters. If someone can work miracles with Viciedo and Garcia on pitch selection/plate discipline, maybe the same is possible with Garcia. But I'll believe it when I see it.

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ Nov 14, 2013 -> 03:16 PM) You have to blame the republicans for putting out s*** product. No one is buying what they are selling except the usual suspects. At some point, they have to go back on the offensive (not just defensive/obstruction) and actually offer some constructive proposals of their own that could conceivably draw bipartisan support.

Candidate Odds Chris Christie 7/1 Marco Rubio 8/1 Sarah Palin 10/1 Paul Ryan 12/1 Rand Paul 15/1 Jeb Bush 18/1 Mike Huckabee 18/1 Eric Cantor 20/1 Mike Pence 20/1 Bob McDonnell 25/1 John Kasich 28/1 John Thune 30/1 Jon Huntsman 30/1 Bobby Jindal 30/1 Luis Fortuño 35/1 Jim Demint 35/1 Scott Walker 35/1 Scott Brown 35/1 Ken Cuccinelli 40/1 Rob Portman 40/1 Rick Santorum 40/1 Tim Pawlenty 40/1 Nikki Haley 40/1 Susana Martinez 40/1 Kelly Ayote 45/1 Rick Perry 45/1 Mitch Daniels 50/1 Julian Castro 75/1 Newt Gingrich 100/1 Pat Toomey 100/1

QUOTE (DukeNukeEm @ Nov 14, 2013 -> 03:08 PM) Look I'll be happy to have this discussion in another thread. But this is about Elizabeth Warren winning the presidency in 2016 and me being very sad about that. Elizabeth Warren just doesn't have enough of a national constituency at this point. Ralph Nader was 10X more famous as a consumer rights advocate. Granted, he didn't run as a Democrat with only two candidates at a time when the GOP was shooting itself in the foot constantly (before the ObamaCare fiasco at least). Personally, as a Democrat, if Hillary doesn't run, I would pick one of those four. Candidate Odds Hillary Clinton 5/1 Joe Biden 8/1 Andrew Cuomo 12/1 Rahm Emmanuel 15/1 Evan Bayh 15/1 Martin O’Malley 15/1 Tim Kaine 15/1 Mark Warner 18/1 Elizabeth Warren 20/1 Dennis Kucinich 20/1 Amy Klobuchar 20/1 Jim Webb 25/1 Brian Schweitzer 25/1 Sherrod Brown 30/1 Kathleen Sebelius 30/1 Claire McCaskill 30/1 Kirsten Gillibrand 35/1 Bob Casey, Jr. 35/1 Janet Napolitano 40/1 Ken Salazar 50/1 Kay Hagan 50/1 John Tester 50/1 Harold Ford, Jr. 100/1 Bill Ritter 100/1